Bribing kids' good behavior

Monday

Apr 23, 2007 at 12:01 AMApr 23, 2007 at 6:39 AM

You've made it through produce and frozen foods. But then, in the middle of the canned-goods aisle, your erstwhile angelic preschooler throws herself to the ground and screams that she wants to go home.

Jennifer Torres

You've made it through produce and frozen foods. But then, in the middle of the canned-goods aisle, your erstwhile angelic preschooler throws herself to the ground and screams that she wants to go home.

Right now.

It's tempting - really tempting - to offer her the run of the candy shelves if she'll just hush up until the shopping trip is finished.

Then again, parenting isn't always so public, so visceral, so mortifyingly noisy.

Maybe your fifth-grader is missing the bus three days out of five. You could promise - and it might work - a dollar for every day he manages to wake up on time.

Using prizes to negotiate good behavior (bribing, if you must) can be convenient, and more to the point, effective. Even schools, with their star charts for homework completed or their pizza parties for test scores earned, do it to some extent.

But, psychologists warn, the quick fix can sometimes result in long-term trouble.

"If you tell your child, 'I'll buy you this if you stop crying,' that's bribery and it's not good," said Los Angeles psychologist Jenn Berman, author of "The A-Z Guide to Raising Happy Confident Kids."

"You're teaching your kid to stop crying because they want to get something from you, not because they shouldn't be crying."

"Ideally, a parent wants to create internal motivation for their child," Berman says, and you can't really bargain your way to that inner drive.

Worse, she said, children can come to expect the quid pro quo: "I'll do my homework if you let me watch 10 hours of TV."

Stockton mother Quita Campbell said she agrees.

Her 3-year-old daughter will start school in two years, and Campbell said she won't be a parent who offers money for good grades.

"You're supposed to get As and Bs," she said.

Research also suggests that rewarding children for things they would or should do anyway, eventually saps their interest for doing that thing at all.

In a study published more than 30 years ago in the journal Child Development, Stanford researchers assembled a group of preschoolers who enjoyed drawing and separated the children into three groups. The first group was told that drawing would earn them special prizes. The second group of children were asked to draw, and if they did, received the prizes unexpectedly. The rest of the children were invited to draw but weren't rewarded for it.

Two weeks later, drawing had lost its dazzle among kids who were told the activity came with a prize.

Sure, says Stockton-based counselor Mary Shaw-Haakonstad.

Perhaps a new alarm clock was all it took to solve your fifth-grader's oversleeping.

But now, he's having trouble multiplying fractions and has stopped doing his math homework.

Perhaps an hour of concentration and effort can be rewarded - unexpectedly - with 30 minutes on the computer on a weeknight instead of the usual 15, Shaw-Haakonstad said. If his next test score is a C+ rather than the previous C-, then "maybe we can go to McDonald's Friday night or buy a CD."

In that case, parents are celebrating an accomplishment, and "there's a difference between celebrating an accomplishment and giving an award," Berman said.

But she said, it takes more than that to help the fifth-grader see success at school as its own reward and the CD as icing.

"Part of that is day-to-day parenting," she said, "How you talk to your kids."

Rewards - as opposed to bribes - can be helpful tools for motivation and encouragement, but even those can be too liberally dispensed, Shaw said.

Some things just get done because you said so and that's that. Chores, for example.

"There are certain things the whole family has to participate in. ... it's part of our responsibilities," Shaw said. "Mom's going to clean the dishes. Dad is going to do the lawn, and Johnny is going to take the trash out. We still say, 'Thank you.' It's always good to acknowledge that the other person did step in and help."

But no trip to the zoo because Madison got her bed made. "You don't get an award for that," Shaw said. "You're being helpful, and I do appreciate that."

In any event, lots of moms and dads propose lots of small, nontoxic-seeming sorts of bribes, Berman said - especially when their 3-year-old is in a rage on the grocery-store floor.

"It's really hard being a parent," she said. "It's really hard to think about the long-term consequences rather than that moment when you just want that screaming to stop.